


In Smothering Darkness

by FictionPenned



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s05e18 The Pine Bluff Variant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26423794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: Fear — deep, bitter, and unrelenting — creeps up his throat and spreads across the back of his mouth. He could die here. His last words could be a bit of biting sarcasm spoken to an anarchist. The thought burns through him — cutting a fiery line from the top of his head all the way down to his toes — but it does not stop his tongue from lashing out again and again and again.Written for the X-Files Episode Fanfic Exchange
Relationships: Fox Mulder & Dana Scully
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36
Collections: X-Files Episode Fanfic Exchange (2020)





	In Smothering Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starwalker42](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starwalker42/gifts).



The constant darkness is _infuriating_.

It nags at the raw edges of Fox Mulder’s soul and tugs on the rapidly unspooling threads of his patience. He would give just about anything to get this hood off his head. It smells like cigarette smoke and decay and somebody else’s B.O. He cannot help but whether or not the last person who wore it was initiated into the ranks of the New Spartans or if their freshly killed corpse was unceremoniously tossed into a river.

Given the way Mulder’s been treated by this group so far, both outcomes seem equally likely.

Mulder’s tempted to pose an adjacent question to the bald-headed, beady-eyed fellow that he knows is sitting next to him, but he thinks better of it. Someone like Haley, the group’s leader, would read too deeply into it. He would assume that Mulder’s nervous because he’s a plant, that he runs back to the Bureau after every meeting in order to spill a pile of New Spartan secrets onto the stuffy carpet. It’s a correct assumption, of course, but as soon as Haley figures that out, he’s a dead man.

Over and over again, Mulder tells himself that he should have said no. He should have declined this undercover assignment. He should have rustled up a quick case to serve as a viable excuse for his lack of participation: “Sorry, sir, can’t poke around shady militia groups today. My dance card’s full up with a group of grisly homicides that might indicate elevated Sasquatch activity in Northern California. Revolutionary stuff. Can’t wait for you to read my partner’s report.”

However, it is _far_ too late to back out now. Mulder knows the names of almost everyone in this organization. He knows their aliases. He knows their faces. He’s seen the insides of a handful of their hideouts, even if he hasn’t seen the outsides. From beneath his hood, he has counted footsteps and meticulously kept track of every turn that it takes to get here. He’s in too deep, and they won’t let him go without a bullet in his head.

Rough, uncaring hands jostle his arms and shoulders when the car finally comes to a stop. He’s pushed and shoved and prodded out of the door, across a stretch of gravel, and into a building of some sort. It’s insufferably hot. Even from beneath the hood, he can tell that the air circulation is poor.

He cracks a sharp joke as he’s thrust into a chair and his wrists are strapped to the table, but no one laughs.

Fear — deep, bitter, and unrelenting — creeps up his throat and spreads across the back of his mouth. He could die here. His last words could be a bit of biting sarcasm spoken to an anarchist. The thought burns through him — cutting a fiery line from the top of his head all the way down to his toes — but it does not stop his tongue from lashing out again and again and again.

The hood is finally lifted. It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light of his surroundings.

He blinks once, twice, three times as he gets a lay of the land.

They are in an unfamiliar location. It seems to be a rough, firearms-laden approximation of a storage shed, and there are woefully few people in attendance. That means less witnesses to his murder, should it come to pass.

Haley sits across from Mulder — calm, collected, and quietly smoldering — and the vile, armed designated muscle hovers at his side.

Mulder does not have much time to adjust to this new situation before Haley poses a threat and a question.

Mulder provides answer that Haley doesn’t like.

In response, the designated muscle reaches out, grabs his pinky, and breaks it.

If Mulder’s heart wasn’t pounding, he might have heard the snap, but the noise falls on deaf ears. Pain flashes behind his eyes and draws a twisted, pathetic noise from his throat. He fights back tears, fights back the truth, fights back thoughts of Scully and Skinner and certain death.

He wishes he was allowed to tell Scully about this undercover assignment. If she was kept in the loop, she would have made absolutely sure that she was lurking in earshot — would have swept in with gun drawn and eyes blazing as soon as she heard him cry out — but he wasn’t allowed to so much as mention it to her. She has started to put the pieces together, he can tell, but without help — without more information — she wouldn’t be able to make it here in time.

Mulder has to rescue himself.

He almost doesn’t hear the next question, and his response is somewhat delayed.

In consequence, his finger is manhandled again.

He dealt with broken bones before, but this is different. This isn’t the result of incidental violence. This isn’t some clumsy fall or a side-effect of too much machismo. This is torture — carefully honed and brutally specific.

Blinking eyes beat back tears as he wields his lies like truth and injects them with false faith.

He clings to belief in every aspect of his life. His belief fuels him. His belief in the inherent goodness of man, his belief in the extraterrestrial, and his belief in the abilities of his partner all provide him with direction, motivation, and determination. In this specific instance, however, he has to direct that belief inward instead of outward. He has to believe in his own abilities.

It has been a long time since his stint at university. At Oxford, he buried himself in profiling and the psychology of lying, but those skills have gotten rusty with time. He no longer sits in crowded offices while reverse-engineering crime scenes into profile and profiles into lists of viable suspects. Instead, he runs around the country, allowing his people skills to rust as he gets better at checking motel mattresses for bedbugs and extrapolating reality from myth.

He has to dig deep into his memories to create a convincing act — building on the foundational truth of his fear as he funnels it into a more useful narrative.

For a moment, he dares thinks that he’s done it — dares to think that he’s fooled them — but he is rewarded with an aerosol can in his face.

He’s seen what the bioweapon inside can do.

He’s seen skin dissolve and flesh melt away.

It seems an awful way to die.

Mulder forgets his lie, loses the artifice, and channels every ounce of his remaining energy into saying the right thing the wrong way.

His broken finger bends all the way back, and the pain multiplies.

He almost blacks out.

And then, against all odds, two sentences cut through the blurred vision and the pain and the fear:

“You know what? I believe you.”

A sigh of relief moves through Mulder’s entire body, and the dam that has been holding his tears at bay finally gives way. He collapses, pressing his face into the back of one of his still bound hands and sends a prayer of gratitude up to the god that Scully worships and he doesn’t.

As long as he can continue to keep Haley and his men in the dark, he’ll be safe.

The constant darkness is _infuriating_.

Mulder isn’t usually a mysterious guy, and it is alarming for Dana Scully to discover that he’s dug a rift between them and filled it full of secrets. She wants to believe the best of him. During their time together, Mulder has repeatedly proven that he’s noble, loyal and kind — the sort of person who would _never_ align himself with a man like Haley or a group like the New Spartans — but she isn’t inclined to discount empirical evidence, and it exists in spades. She has watched the surveillance tape of the strange handoff between Mulder and Haley repeatedly, and perhaps she’s a naïve, hopeful fool, but a stubborn part of her keeps expecting it to change whenever she rewinds and plays it again. She spent hours searching for something — _anything_ — that would prove that Mulder didn’t betray the Bureau — a glance, a gesture, a nod, a wink, a whisper — but there’s nothing at all.

It’s like he’s an entirely different person entirely.

Even when she speaks to him alone, outside of environments contaminated with surveillance cameras and hidden recording devices and other colleagues, he feels _off_.

Mulder doesn’t usually hide things from her. Scully knows the intimate details of his personal life. She knows how much food to feed his fish. She knows where he stashes his porn. She knows every beat of his medical history and can recite it from memory. In many ways, they aren’t just work partners anymore. They’re _life_ partners, which makes the thought of betrayal all the more agonizing.

Scully is itching to talk to someone about it in the hopes of finding clarity, but she knows that the mere mention of her current fears could be enough for Mulder to be interrogated, fired, and possibly incarcerated. In a government organization like the F.B.I., treason is a crime of the highest order, and even _suspected_ treason could be grounds for termination, and though she is angry and frustrated beyond belief, she has no interest in throwing Mulder to the wolves.

She cares about him too deeply to do something like that. However, that does not stop her from trying to corner him.

She drops hints. She leaves the footage from the bungled raid on pause in the middle of the shared basement office. She reaches out her hand and gently wraps her fingers around his wrist and lets him know that he can trust her with his secrets. Unfortunately, none of that has made a dent in his resolve.

Whatever Mulder is hiding from her, he’s locked it inside an airtight vault, and he is steadfastly refusing to hand over the combination.

With desperation scrabbling at the inside of her chest and threatening to claw its way out, Scully resorts to increasingly underhanded methods to discover the truth. She tries to trick him, she tries to manipulate him, and when the opportunity arises, she hops in her car and follows him down a two lane highway after watching him climb into a mysterious, unmarked car. She keeps her headlights turned off to minimize her chances of being noticed, and her rental cuts through the darkness in near silence as she fights to stay within sight of the car ahead of her.

With no other distraction available, her thoughts rush to fill the quiet void as she drives.

Scully runs through the list of viable possibilities, trying to figure out whether or not there’s a reasonable option in the bunch. It’s a useless exercise. Eventually, she is forced to confront the fact that there is no logical explanation for Mulder’s behavior. Everything he’s done looks bad. Every question that has gone unanswered reeks of guilt. Every averted gaze screams complicity. Every sarcastic, biting joke speaks to deflection.

Scully fears what she might find at the end of this road as much as she fears her ignorance itself.

A car pulls across the road in front of her, blocking her way and blinding her with overly bright headlights. Panic rises in her throat and in her chest, pressing against her pulse as she throws the car in reverse, ready to turn around and run from what she can only assume is a contingency sent by whatever group Mulder is currently working for, but her escape is cut short by the sudden appearance of another car in her rearview mirror.

There is no way back and no way out. The dark of the moonless night threatens to close in, tighten its grip around her lungs, and suffocate her in its unshakeable grip. She is acutely aware of the firearm strapped to her side, but she does not reach for it. Better to appear unarmed until she knows the rules of engagement.

Men get out of the car, and as they draw closer, she can make out their features and their badges.

These men are not from a militia group.

They are not traitors.

They’re employees of the U.S. government.

By all rights, it is a reality that _should_ make her feel better. It should make her sigh with relief and thank God for her salvation, but it doesn’t.

Instead Mulder’s secret seems to swell, enveloping more and more people in its gravity. 

The crushing darkness redoubles, and Scully is terribly afraid of the horrors that she might uncover whenever someone finally bothers to hand her a light.

**Author's Note:**

> A response to the prompt: Would love some Mulder POV in the more dramatic moments of this episode, like the torture scene or when he's about to be shot. What's going through his mind? Is he scared for Scully? Does he regret not telling her about his mission?


End file.
